Coincidentally I've had two relevant 'incidents' today:
My car broke down. Well, more precisely, it wouldn't start. I'd driven it to a place about half a mile from home to pick up some stuff and when I came back to it, it turned over really slowly a couple of times without firing before stopping, then just clicked when I turned the key. With no hint of irony, the battery was completely dead. It wasn't completely unexpected as it's now five years old and the stop start had stopped stopping a few days ago, so I knew the battery was on the way out.
Short story even shorter, I walked home, ordered a new battery from Halfords (£160), had some lunch then took my wife's car to collect it half an hour later. The battery took less than ten minutes to replace (thank you Nissan for not hiding it under a bulkhead) and I was back on the road about 2hrs after my 'breakdown'. I wonder how much/how long to replace a Tesla battery?
My second 'incident' was this evening at about 7pm when I drove to my local Tesco for a few essentials (well, bottles of wine). As I slowly drove into the car park watching out for pedestrians crossing to the store, I was suddenly both distracted and dazzled by a bright white laser light show akin to the type of thing you see lighting up public buildings at Christmas. The road ahead of me was flooded with swooshing patterns which rose up and down like the special effects in a panto. If a child had run into the road in front of me I'd have squashed them flat it was so distracting.
Only this wasn't coming from the Town Hall. No, this was coming from the front of the most stupidly enormous Mercedes suv, whose owner had just unplugged it from one of the electric charging points. Presumably the flashing light display is designed to alert everyone else that this complete tw*t has bought himself a three tonne, £100k behemoth that's going to save the planet (yeah, right).
In reality, it is just about the most pointless, unnecesary and potentially dangerous 'feature' I have seen on a car since they started putting 'infotainment' centres in the dashboard where the wireless should be.
And why the blinking flip does anyone need to plug in their EV when all they're doing is popping to Tesco for a packet of fags and a pint of milk? After all, nobody fills up with petrol every time they stop at a store with a filling station, just when their tank is getting low.
I suppose it's because an EV's range is crap.
Last edited by Mister Towed; 5th January 2022 at 19:49..
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